The war of the worlds
escape of the multitudinous vessels that were crowded between Foulness
and the Naze. In spite of the throbbing exertions of the engines of the
little paddle-boat, and the pouring foam that her wheels flung behind
her, she receded with terrifying slowness from this ominous advance.
Glancing northwestward, my brother saw the large crescent of shipping
already writhing with the approaching terror; one ship passing behind
another, another coming round from broadside to end on, steamships
whistling and giving off volumes of steam, sails being let out,
launches rushing hither and thither. He was so fascinated by this and
by the creeping danger away to the left that he had no eyes for
anything seaward. And then a swift movement of the steamboat (she had
suddenly come round to avoid being run down) flung him headlong from
the seat upon which he was standing. There was a shouting all about
him, a trampling of feet, and a cheer that seemed to be answered
faintly. The steamboat lurched and rolled him over upon his hands.
He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards
from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of a
plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge
waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles
helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the
waterline.
A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were
clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big
iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin
funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the
torpedo ram, _Thunder Child_, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue
of the threatened shipping.
Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my
brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and
he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to
sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus
sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less
formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was
pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new
antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the
giant was even such another as themselves. The _Thunder Child_ fired no
gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not
firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did
not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her
to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.
She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway
between the steamboat and the Martians—a diminishing black bulk against
the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.
Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a
canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and
glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding
torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the
watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their
eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.
They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as
they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like
generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and
a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven
through the iron of the ship’s side like a white-hot iron rod through
paper.
A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the
Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a
great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the
_Thunder Child_ sounded through the reek, going off one after the
other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer,
ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a
smack to matchwood.
But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian’s
collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the
crowding passengers on the steamer’s stern shouted together. And then
they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove
something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts,
its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.
She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her
engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was
within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with
a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped
upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and
in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the
impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of
cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam
hid everything again.
“Two!” yelled the captain.
Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with
frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the
crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.
The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third
Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was
paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last
the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened,
and nothing of the _Thunder Child_ could be made out, nor could the
third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite
close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.
The little vessel continued to beat its way seaward, and the ironclads
receded slowly towards the coast, which was hidden still by a marbled
bank of vapour, part steam, part black gas, eddying and combining in
the strangest way. The fleet of refugees was scattering to the
northeast; several smacks were sailing between the ironclads and the
steamboat. After a time, and before they reached the sinking cloud
bank, the warships turned northward, and then abruptly went about and
passed into the thickening haze of evening southward. The coast grew
faint, and at last indistinguishable amid the low banks of clouds that
were gathering about the sinking sun.
Then suddenly out of the golden haze of the sunset came the vibration
of guns, and a form of black shadows moving. Everyone struggled to the
rail of the steamer and peered into the blinding furnace of the west,
but nothing was to be distinguished clearly. A mass of smoke rose
slanting and barred the face of the sun. The steamboat throbbed on its
way through an interminable suspense.
The sun sank into grey clouds, the sky flushed and darkened, the
evening star trembled into sight. It was deep twilight when the captain
cried out and pointed. My brother strained his eyes. Something rushed
up into the sky out of the greyness—rushed slantingly upward and very
swiftly into the luminous clearness above the clouds in the western
sky; something flat and broad, and very large, that swept round in a
vast curve, grew smaller, sank slowly, and vanished again into the grey
mystery of the night. And as it flew it rained down darkness upon the
land.
BOOK TWO
THE EARTH UNDER THE MARTIANS.
I.
UNDER FOOT.
In the first book I have wandered so much from my own adventures to
tell of the experiences of my brother that all through the last two
chapters I and the curate have been lurking in the empty house at
Halliford whither we fled to escape the Black Smoke. There I will
resume. We stopped there all Sunday night and all the next day—the day
of the panic—in a little island of daylight, cut off by the Black Smoke
from the rest of the world. We could do nothing but wait in aching
inactivity during those two weary days.
My mind was occupied by anxiety for my wife. I figured her at
Leatherhead, terrified, in danger, mourning me already as a dead man. I
paced the rooms and cried aloud when I thought of how I was cut off
from her, of all that might happen to her in my absence. My cousin I
knew was brave enough for any emergency, but he was not the sort of man
to realise danger quickly, to rise promptly. What was needed now was
not bravery, but circumspection. My only consolation was to believe
that the Martians were moving Londonward and away from her. Such vague
anxieties keep the mind sensitive and painful. I grew very weary and
irritable with the curate’s perpetual ejaculations; I tired of the
sight of his selfish despair. After some ineffectual remonstrance I
kept away from him, staying in a room—evidently a children’s
schoolroom—containing globes, forms, and copybooks. When he followed me
thither, I went to a box room at the top of the house and, in order to
be alone with my aching miseries, locked myself in.
We were hopelessly hemmed in by the Black Smoke all that day and the
morning of the next. There were signs of people in the next house on
Sunday evening—a face at a window and moving lights, and later the
slamming of a door. But I do not know who these people were, nor what
became of them. We saw nothing of them next day. The Black Smoke
drifted slowly riverward all through Monday morning, creeping nearer
and nearer to us, driving at last along the roadway outside the house
that hid us.
A Martian came across the fields about midday, laying the stuff with a
jet of superheated steam that hissed against the walls, smashed all the
windows it touched, and scalded the curate’s hand as he fled out of the
front room. When at last we crept across the sodden rooms and looked
out again, the country northward was as though a black snowstorm had
passed over it. Looking towards the river, we were astonished to see an
unaccountable redness mingling with the black of the scorched meadows.
For a time we did not see how this change affected our position, save
that we were relieved of our fear of the Black Smoke. But later I
perceived that we were no longer hemmed in, that now we might get away.
So soon as I realised that the way of escape was open, my dream of
action returned. But the curate was lethargic, unreasonable.
“We are safe here,” he repeated; “safe here.”
I resolved to leave him—would that I had! Wiser now for the
artilleryman’s teaching, I sought out food and drink. I had found oil
and rags for my burns, and I also took a hat and a flannel shirt that I
found in one of the bedrooms. When it was clear to him that I meant to
go alone—had reconciled myself to going alone—he suddenly roused
himself to come. And all being quiet throughout the afternoon, we
started about five o’clock, as I should judge, along the blackened road
to Sunbury.
In Sunbury, and at intervals along the road, were dead bodies lying in
contorted attitudes, horses as well as men, overturned carts and
luggage, all covered thickly with black dust. That pall of cindery
powder made me think of what I had read of the destruction of Pompeii.
We got to Hampton Court without misadventure, our minds full of strange
and unfamiliar appearances, and at Hampton Court our eyes were relieved
to find a patch of green that had escaped the suffocating drift. We
went through Bushey Park, with its deer going to and fro under the
chestnuts, and some men and women hurrying in the distance towards
Hampton, and so we came to Twickenham. These were the first people we
saw.
Away across the road the woods beyond Ham and Petersham were still
afire. Twickenham was uninjured by either Heat-Ray or Black Smoke, and
there were more people about here, though none could give us news. For
the most part they were like ourselves, taking advantage of a lull to